Video: Sending work from Premiere Pro to SpeedGrade

There are a couple of ways of getting your content from Premiere Pro into SpeedGrade. And I'm presuming here that you've completed your edit, and now it's time for you to apply your grade. Do your finishing work. Let's say you've decided not to use Premiere Pro's Special Effects and you're not going to use After Effects. You've decided that you're going to make your cut in Premiere Pro, you can use all of the new trimming and everything, that's great. And then, you're going to do the finishing in SpeedGrade. Now, there's an official straightforward way that takes a little bit of time, and it makes big files.

One of the great strengths of the Adobe Creative Suite Production Premium 6 is the seamless integration between the various applications. Even so, the best-practice approach to sharing media and creative work between applications remains mysterious to many users. In this course filmmaker and author Maxim Jago breaks everything down into simple, clear steps, offering guidance on project and file management and examples that demonstrate the best use of the technology. If you use Adobe Creative Suite CS6 for video post-production, this course can make your work faster, easier, and more efficient.

Topics include:

Improving speech-to-text analysis with Story

Organizing projects in Prelude

Batch renaming with Bridge

Preparing images for video in Illustrator

Working with Photoshop files in Premiere Pro

Round-tripping a soundtrack from Premiere Pro to Audition and back again

Sending work from Premiere Pro to SpeedGrade

There are a couple of ways of getting your content from Premiere Pro into SpeedGrade. And I'm presuming here that you've completed your edit, and now it's time for you to apply your grade. Do your finishing work. Let's say you've decided not to use Premiere Pro's Special Effects and you're not going to use After Effects. You've decided that you're going to make your cut in Premiere Pro, you can use all of the new trimming and everything, that's great. And then, you're going to do the finishing in SpeedGrade. Now, there's an official straightforward way that takes a little bit of time, and it makes big files.

And there's another way that it's still official and it still works, but it's using the original media so it's much much faster. If you use the second option, you're not going to get any effects work that you've applied inside Premiere Pro. So, the first option is we go to File, and we choose Send to Adobe SpeedGrade. And this is just going to invite us to make an IRCP file, this is a SpeedGrade project, if you like. And I'm not going to go right the way through the process because it makes pretty big files and I won't include these with the other assets.

But let's say this is SpeedGrade Oops, from, Premiere Pro. And I'm going to click Open, and I've got this IRCP file type listed. But I'm not just going to get a IRCP file, I'm actually going to get all of the frames of the video from my sequence as a DPX sequence. In fact, what I'm going to do just to illustrate this is I'm going to put a simple color effect on. And let's just put the fast color corrector on the first one of these. Okay and let's make this very, very blue so it's nice and clear. You can see there's an effect on that first shot. Now, I'm going to go File > Send to SpeedGrade.

Let's put that back on the Desktop in our SpeedGrade folder. The Paladin is, the name of that sequence you can see just in the background there. So, okay. I, of course I can change that file name. I'm going to click Save, and now Premiere Pro is going to begin generating these DPX files. It doesn't take that long, but bear in mind this is about, what is that? 23 seconds. We've got a 23 second duration for our sequence. It's still taking a little while, but the main issue here is that the files are very large. Now, DPX is an excellent option if you want to produce a series of frames that represent your pictures.

Very commonly used by the feature film industry as an intermediate format. And it's useful film scans and so on. It stores a lot of metadata. It's very high quality. But again, it's very large files. If I pull this folder on screen so you can see it, this is the output from Premiere Pro. There's my IRCP file. That's my SpeedGrade project. And here is the folder that contains the media. You can see we've got a folder for each shot, and all of these DPX files, one for each frame. And just take a look at this size, this is a 20, let's go up one here. This is a 23 second sequence, 1.9 GB.

It's pretty big for a 23 second sequence. It's uncompressed HD. In fact, this isn't even full 1080 HD, this is 1280x720. So, imagine just how big these files can be if you're working with what I would call full HD. Now, the great thing about this workflow is if I just jump over to SpeedGrade, you can see SpeedGrade already got the project open. I didn't need to fire up SpeedGrade. I didn't need to create a project or worry about any import or export settings. Here is my timeline in SpeedGrade, and you can see my content displayed.

And down under reels, you can see here I've got the three clips that are part of that sequence. So, now I can go in and I can begin to make changes, and I can put a grade on and so on, and so on, and so on, and so on. So, the upside with that workflow is that you really don't need to think. If I just toggle back to Premiere Pro, I can just go File > Send to SpeedGrade. And as long as I've got enough storage space and I'm happy with the DPX file type, I'm kind of set and ready to go in SpeedGrade. That kind of works for me. But there is a way that is a little bit quicker.

I'm going to go the File menu and I'm going to choose Export. And this time, I'm going to choose EDL. Now, this work flow isn't going to work if you've got a complex timeline. You can do it but you're going to have to produce multiple EDLs, one for each video track. But if you are doing a single layer of video clips, it can be a really fast way of getting your media into SpeedGrade with cuts. This menu actually lets me generate CMX 3600 EDL. There aren't very many controls on the formatting of it.

I suppose it's not like Avid where you get this very, very detailed control of the way EDL are generated. This is just a standard one, but we know it's going to work. We've got some basic control over which audio, notice that this kind of EDL is limited to one video track and four audio channels. Here, we've got out Audio 1 and Audio 2, Channel 1 and Channel 2 but you can choose whatever you want. Ideals will take limited information about video levels and audio levels there's not many options here for you to choose from. I'm going to click OK.

And this time, I'll just put this back on the Desktop again in our SpeedGrade folder. I'm going to make a new folder and I'll call this EDL Example. And once again I, well, I'll include that in with the other assets. I won't include the 2 GB of Paladin media, you can make that yourself. So I'll open that folder and I'll call this EDL Example. You can see I've got a save as type option, but I can't choose anything else here, it's just CMX 3600. And I'm going to click Save. And that was it, did you even see it? I just clicked Save and it's done.

If I toggle over to that folder, here we go, you can see there's my EDL example and the file is there. It's 1 KB, it's absolutely tiny. This is just a series of links that point to my original media. Now, I'm going to jump over to SpeedGrade. I'm going to delete this timeline that I had open before. I'm going to browse to that directory. Now inside of SpeedGrade, if you're browsing directories, you're probably going to need to Refresh. In this case, it's come up okay. But don't forget, you may need to click on this button, which just gets SpeedGrade to re-scan the directory and look for content. So, here's my EDL, there we go, edlexample.edl.

I'm going to click the Plus sign to add this to my timeline, and this now has my three shots. But of course, if I jump over to the Monitor view, they're all offline, I don't have any media yet. So, under the timeline section of the interface here, and I, this is probably a good moment to point out. We're working on a too low resolution monitor here, this is 1280x720. All of our video courses are at that resolution, and you need a higher resolution monitor for SpeedGrade. So, things are chopped off a little bit. If I click on reels here and go up to my Browsing panels, you can have multiple Browsing panels in SpeedGrade if you like.

Here I can see my original media, I know that it's in palette in folder. And I'm going pretty quick here. But you can see that those are our project files and media assets and video in palette, and I happen to know these are the shots. So, having selected that, down here, under the reels section of my timeline tap, I can choose Load from Desktop. I'm getting a warning about frame rates, that's not too important. If I jump over to monitor now, I can see there's my media and I'm ready to begin my grade. So, the big difference here is I'm working on my original content. But look at this, the first shot.

If I jump over to Premiere Pro, that first shot has a really vivid blue color cast on it because I added a fast color corrector. There it is in my Controls panel. If I jump over to SpeedGrade, that effect is gone. So, if you use the regular Official option, go to File menu and choose Send to SpeedGrade. You're going to have baked into the content baked into those DPX files, any effects work that you've done already in Premiere Pro. And that might be desirable. If you choose the EDL option I've just shown you, you're not going to have any effects work at all.

It really is just cuts timed in the correct order, so you've got the clips ready to do the grade on. There is no right and wrong here. It's just a question of the workflow that you prefer. If you really get into using SpeedGrade, and it is a fantastic grading application. You may decide that there's just no benefit in doing any significant effects working Premiere Pro. Perhaps, you can bake in some effects that you really need for scaling and adjustment and so on. And then replace the clip with the exported version before you send it into SpeedGrade. There's loads of ways that you can approach this.

But as long as you're clear of the difference, that's the main thing. Sending out an EDL is going to give you clean, original media. These are the actual .mov files that we used in my original sequence. Sending over the DPX files is going to give you the effects baked in. So, that's two ways for you to send your media from Premiere Pro into Adobe SpeedGrade CS6.

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